Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (181 mails)

Re: [opensuse-project] Announcing the official openSUSE Forums

From:
Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date:
Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:10:52 +0100

Message-id:
<47DADBCC.4010007@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

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Per Jessen wrote:
| Pascal Bleser wrote:
|> It's always easy to criticise and say "you must do this" or "you
|> should do that" or even "you have no clue" when you don't have to set
|> it up, make it work and provide a reliable service.
|
| Oh, will you get off your high horse for second.

No high horse there, just a knee-jerk reaction to "Novell should write a
secure PHP based web forum on its own".
As I wrote, it's always easy to tell everyone what to do on a topic one
isn't involved in. I absolutely love those.

|> Because of that, and purely out of technical reasons, the people who
|> make the service work are the ones to decide on the technology.
|
| I beg to differ. The technology is not just for admins to decide. There
| are other considerations to take into account than just how to run it.
| For instance, in the current case, why on earth was
| http://forums.novell.com/ not chosen as the common platform?
| Everything is already implemented, almost nothing left to do. But no -
| presumably the "admins" didn't know that, and decided they needed to
| reinvent the wheel.

One of the 4 people heavily involved into the process is Kim Groneman,
and he's the current admin of forums.novell.com

Incidentally, the software and infrastructure running forums.novell.com
is the platform for forums.opensuse.org
Actually, as I wrote in my previous post, that fact + Kim and the staff
at Novell knowing vBulletin well is a point that had quite some weight
into the forum software evaluation.

|> | having openSUSE run a proprietary software is a bad advertisement
|> | for open source (even, may be mostly, if justifiyed), so IMHO we
|> | sould make some sort of effort to try solving this for the future.
|>
|> Ah, you are proposing to write a new opensource web forum project from
|> scratch, secure from the ground up yourself ? Or to audit and fix and
|> support all of phpBB's source code ?
|>
|> You clearly need a reality check: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/30
|
| Pascal, is it just me, or are you being unnecessarily aggressive? Do
| relax for a second, please.

Not sure whether I was aggressive, certainly wasn't my intention, or
well... maybe just slightly. I was just trying to point out to jdd how
ridiculous his argumentation for having to use an opensource web forum
software at all costs was. Especially the "you/Novell should write its own".

And sorry, what I do find aggressive is someone not involved into the
process and not even knowing how to write software telling others what
they must do, implying they're wrong and too ignorant to have weighted
the pros and cons of every option.

|> Just to clarify: the announcement wasn't an invitation to discuss
|> which software should be used.
|
| Who are you to clarify the announcement made by somebody else? Besides,

Because I'm part of the people who are discussing and organizing the
forum merge -- even though the hard work is clearly being done by
Rupert, Keith, Wolfgang and Kim. I'm just there to help a bit where I
can, but I did follow and participate in the whole discussion.

| we don't need an invitation to have a discussion.

True. Of course, anyone may comment and give his opinion.
But that's different from criticizing the people who worked on the task
so far without knowing the background or making assumptions they have no
clue (I'm not saying _you_ did ;)).

|> The software to run the forum has already been discussed and selected
|> by the ones who are concerned by its maintenance (primarily Kim, Keith
|> and Wolfgang).
|
| Ah, then I have to repeat my question - why wasn't the existing platform
| chosen? It's already being maintained ....

It is the existing platform. And indeed, it was the best option as it's
already being maintained ;)